Fields of Interest

Anti-depressants

Subjective experiences are the products of the brain's physical state, so anything your external world can make you experience, your internal neurology can make you experience. Malfunctioning neurologies drag people into internal hellscapes all the time.

Often, the only way to counteract this is through interventions that also target neurology: antidepressants and TMS, for instance, have rescued innumerable minds beyond the reach of therapy. But current treatments are still imperfect; we want to bridge this gap by funding work on emerging paradigms in the treatment of depression.

We aim to support:

• Development of personalized treatment methods that can target the specific mechanisms that have caused an individual's mental dysfunction.
• Clinical research on novel therapeutic interventions, including psychedelics, neurostimulation, and microbiome-targeting treatments.
• Scalable, effective programs focused on eliminating barriers to treatment, like stigma, access, and cost.

Animal welfare

Wild animal suffering

If you have a pet, you're likely familiar with what makes them feel excited, annoyed, curious, scared, or relaxed; you've likely seen first-hand that animals have wide emotional palettes, often very similar to our own. Animals feel like we feel.

Yet almost all of them don't get to live long lives in warm homes with us; they live short, brutal lives in the wilderness. Animals in the wilderness feel like we feel when they're torn screaming into bloody chunks; they feel like we feel when their guts bloat with roundworms and the starvation pangs begin. Nature subjects animals to unimaginable suffering for no purpose, but if we can free ourselves from nature, we can figure out how to free them too.

We support ideas that bring a better future for animals closer to reality, including:

• Research into biotechnological interventions to mitigate animal suffering in the wild.
• Investigation of the tractability, cost-effectiveness, and ecological impact of such interventions.
• Scientifically grounded study of animal sentience and moral patiency.

Factory farming

"Workers open the hide on the legs, the stomach, the neck; they cut off the feet while the cow is breathing. It makes noise. It's looking around. Cows can get seven minutes down the line and still be alive. […] Sometimes you can tell they're alive because when you look at their eyes, you can see the tears of a cow. And their eyes are moving and everything."

Gail Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse

Appeals to morality have not won over the general public. How many more will it take to admit that there is not going to be a global revolution in consciousness; that compassion will never win a majority vote?

We need better tactics:

• Improvement and expansion of the legal rights and protections of non-human animals through systematic, strategic, and targeted legislative efforts.
• Development of suffering-free, market-viable alternatives to the products of factory farming, such as cultured meat, and protection of their legality.
• Pressure on animal agriculture corporations through shareholder activism, corporate boycotts, and other forms of non-violent direct action, together with legal support and platforms for slaughterhouse workers and other direct participants to speak about their experiences.

Artificial intelligence

Recently, our computers started talking like people, and they're getting better at it every month. This won't be reversed or even slowed down, so the open questions are who builds what capabilities, when, under what constraints. We support work on:

• How to make powerful AI useful without making it dangerous, in ways that survive contact with adversaries who do not care.
• How to make malicious deployment of these systems harder than it would otherwise be — in particular, deployment that scales the reach of cruelty (mass scams, mass blackmail, mass surveillance, autonomous weapons) at low marginal cost.
• Whether and when AIs themselves can suffer, on what criteria we ought to make that judgement, and what to do once we have.

Genetic engineering

People have vastly differing vulnerabilities to physical and mental illness. These were determined by coin flips written in stone at conception, yet the technologies that can rewrite them are getting cheaper and more accessible. Germline editing can drastically reduce global suffering, yet it'll force us to make tradeoffs within, and between, matters of individual health and of societal cohesion. We support work that navigates these tradeoffs to ensure the large-scale deployment of genetic engineering technology on terms that don't make existing inequalities worse.

Specifically, we are interested in:

• Technically informed analyses of timelines on which genetic engineering capacities will proliferate.
• Research agendas designed to better inform choices regarding these tradeoffs, not just to defer them.

Human welfare

Global development

Billions of people live without reliable access to food, clean water, basic medicine, or physical safety. Much of this would be solvable with better coordination. We support cost-effective work on extreme poverty, infectious disease, and preventable death, and on identifying who is actually doing that work well.

This area is still being formalized; detailed grantmaking criteria are forthcoming.

Realizing our potential

It would be a mistake to think the project ends with the elimination of suffering. A world without depression, chronic pain, predation, or industrial cruelty is a starting line, not a finish. The longer-term question is what a thriving sentient civilization actually looks like, and what is required to make sure one exists at all.

• The Hedonistic Imperative: David Pearce's foundational case for abolishing suffering throughout the living world.
• The Precipice: Toby Ord's analysis of the catastrophes humanity needs to avoid in order to have any kind of long-term future at all.